Cristiano Ronaldo, one of the greatest footballers in history, turns 40 today. He is still playing, still scoring goals and has not displayed even the slightest hint of wanting to retire.
To mark the occasion, The Athletic has come up with 40 stats, facts and pieces of trivia about the Portuguese forward and his remarkable career.
Has he played the most games in the history of the sport? What is the only competition Ronaldo has appeared in but not scored? Who is the earliest-born team-mate he has featured alongside?
The answers to all that and much more are right here…
1) Ronaldo has played 1,261 professional games in his career — 31 for Sporting CP, 346 at Manchester United, 438 for Real Madrid, 134 at Juventus, 95 for Al Nassr and 217 for Portugal. He has played a total of 102,962 minutes, or 71 days, since his debut in August 2002. His sides have triumphed in 833 of these games, a win rate of 66.1 per cent.
2) Ronaldo has scored 923 goals — more than Thierry Henry, Alessandro Del Piero and Marcus Rashford combined. The first came in October 2002 for Sporting in Portugal’s top flight and his most recent was for Al Nassr in the AFC Champions League on Monday. Below is the breakdown of Ronaldo’s goals by the teams he has played for.
3) These 1,261 games mean Ronaldo is 122 away from Peter Shilton’s all-time record of the most matches played in the history of top-level football. The English goalkeeper appeared in 1,383 official top-level games during a career that stretched from 1966 to 1997. However, 44-year-old Brazilian goalkeeper Fabio, who plays in his homeland for Fluminense, has played 1,342 matches and is just 41 off Shilton’s mark.
4) On March 29 this year, Ronaldo’s debut will be closer to the 1970s than it is to the present day.
5) Ronaldo has scored the most goals in the history of the European Cup/Champions League, with 140. His first came in April 2007 for Manchester United against Roma and his most recent was against Villarreal in November 2021, also for United. Surprisingly, he took 27 games to score his first goal in the competition. Below is Ronaldo’s path to the record 140 goals.
6) The 40-year-old has scored the most goals in the history of men’s international football — finding the net 135 times for Portugal. Of these goals, a staggering 83 have come after his 30th birthday. This means he has scored more goals for Portugal since turning 30 than anyone has ever scored, at any age, for 202 of the 210 other FIFA-recognised countries. The eight exceptions are: Argentina (Lionel Messi: 112), Iran (Ali Daei: 108), India (Sunil Chhetri: 94), Malaysia (Mokhtar Dahari: 89), UAE (Ali Mabkhout: 85), Belgium (Romelu Lukaku: 85), Hungary (Ferenc Puskas: 84), and Poland (Robert Lewandowski: 84).
7) Ronaldo has also played the most games in the history of men’s international football, with 217. That figure means he has appeared in 32 per cent of the matches in Portugal’s history. They played their first game in 1921 — almost 82 years before Ronaldo’s debut.
8) In his debut season, Ronaldo played alongside Paulo Bento, who was born before human beings had walked on the moon (June 1969).
9) He has scored 11 per cent of the goals in Portugal’s history (135 out of 1,197).
10) He has scored 590 goals with his right foot, 178 with his left foot, 153 with his head, one with his right thigh (for Manchester United against West Ham United in the Premier League in May 2008) and one with his left elbow (for Madrid against Athletic Club in La Liga in October 2014). If you excluded his goals with his stronger right foot, he would still have scored 333 times — 11 more than Robin van Persie did in his entire career and just 12 fewer than Diego Maradona’s total of 345.
11) During his last five seasons at Madrid (2013-14 to 2017-18), Ronaldo scored 34 goals in the Champions League knockout stage — 21 more than anyone else during this period. These 34 goals came in just 32 games and Ronaldo was in his thirties for 26 of the matches. Madrid won the competition in four of those seasons. Below are the 10 top scorers in the knockout stage during that period.
12) Overall, Ronaldo scored 105 goals for Madrid in the Champions League in his nine seasons at the club — six more than Manchester United, who he left to join the Spanish giants, scored in the competition in this period.
13) Ronaldo is the only man to have scored at five World Cups (2006, 2010, 2014, 2018 and 2022). He will be hoping to make that six in North America next year.
14) Despite finding the net at five editions of the tournament, Ronaldo has never scored in the knockout stage of the World Cup. He has played eight matches and a total of 569 minutes of knockout football in the competition. In contrast, Just Fontaine scored seven goals in 270 minutes for France in the knockout stage of the 1958 World Cup.
15) Ronaldo has scored 66 hat-tricks in his career — and here they all are.
16) Ronaldo has scored against 202 different teams in his career — with Spanish club Sevilla (27 goals) the side he has found the net against the most often.
17) Here are the nine teams Ronaldo has played against more than twice and never scored against.
18) The most games in a row Ronaldo has scored across all competitions is 11 — from February 11, 2014, to April 2, 2014.
19) The most games in a row Ronaldo has gone without scoring is 27. This run lasted from December 22, 2002, to October 25, 2003.
20) Ronaldo has scored the most goals in the history of the European Championship, with 14.
21) He has also played the most games in the history of the European Championship, with 30. These matches have come across six tournaments (also a record), with 2004 his first Euros and 2024 his most recent. Ronaldo played alongside someone born in 1969 at the former (Fernando Couto) and someone born in 2004 at the latter (Joao Neves).
22) Two members of Portugal’s squad at Euro 2024 were born after Ronaldo’s international debut in August 2003 (Antonio Silva was born in October 2003 and Neves was born in September 2004).
23) The most goals Ronaldo has scored in a season (for club and country) is 69 in 2011-12. He has scored 50+ goals in nine different campaigns during his career. Below is the full breakdown.
24) The player Ronaldo has played on the same team as for the most number of matches in his career is Karim Benzema, with 355 (all for Madrid).
25) Ronaldo has scored 791 of his 923 goals from inside the box, a figure that includes 172 penalties. He has scored 132 goals from outside the box.
26) Ronaldo has scored in 28 different competitions in his career, with the breakdown below. The only competition he has played in and never scored is the English Community Shield (a one-off match between the previous season’s winners of the Premier League and FA Cup). Ronaldo, then 22, featured against Chelsea in the 2007 edition for Manchester United but couldn’t find the net in a 1-1 draw before United won on penalties (he didn’t take part in the shootout).
27) Ronaldo scored more goals in his thirties than in his twenties. He scored 460 goals (in 543 games) from the ages of 30 to 39 and 440 goals (in 596 games) from 20 to 29. Ronaldo scored 23 times as a teenager.
28) He has scored in every year of his career, from 2002 to 2025.
29) He has scored 64 free kicks in his career, the first being in the Premier League for Manchester United against Portsmouth in November 2003. The most he has scored in a season is seven, in 2011-12 (one more than he netted in 2018-19, 2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 combined). The only campaign of Ronaldo’s career in which he hasn’t scored a free kick is his first one — 2002-03.
30) Ronaldo has scored 23 goals in finals — three for Manchester United, 15 for Madrid, two for Juventus and three for Al Nassr. Here they are:
31) He has scored against 48 different international sides. This is four more teams than there are countries in Europe, according to the United Nations.
32) The section of a match that Ronaldo has scored the most times in is the 76th to 90th minutes. Whereas the period he has found the net the least often in (excluding extra time) is the first 15 minutes.
33) Ronaldo scored 25 goals in his last 18 Champions League games for Madrid. He scored more than once in nine of these matches.
34) Ronaldo has scored at 10 major tournaments (five World Cups and five European Championships). No other European player has found the net at more than six.
35) Ronaldo’s career debut came in the same year Paul Gascoigne played his final game in the English top flight (2002).
36) That debut also came during FIFA’s brief abandonment of the rule that a player is to be shown a yellow card for taking their shirt off. However, not long after Ronaldo made his splash in professional football, the rule had been reinstated. It is not known whether the two were related.
37) His 31 Premier League goals in the 2007-08 season is the most anyone has scored in a league campaign for Manchester United since 1959-60 when Dennis Viollet netted 32 times.
38) Ronaldo has not taken a penalty in 24 per cent of the shootouts he has been on the pitch for over the course of his career (four out of 17).
39) He has never scored on his birthday, having played three games on February 5 in his career. Academica (18th birthday in 2003), Birmingham City (20th birthday in 2005) and Atletico Madrid (29th birthday in 2014) are the three sides to have ruined Ronaldo’s big day. He did, however, embark on his career-best 11-match scoring run after that blank against Atletico in 2014.
40) Ronaldo is the only player to score a penalty in extra time in the European Cup/Champions League final — doing so in the 120th minute against Atletico in the Portuguese capital of Lisbon in 2014. He was booked for taking his shirt off in celebration.